Australian collections

By Karen HeinrichApril 15 2002

In Australia, the archive market is much less fervent.

Stephen Tapsell, of Tapsell's Books in Beechworth in north-eastern Victoria, is offering the fourth draft of Peter Carey's seventh novel, the Booker prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang, for sale for $50,000.

So far, no one has bitten. It has been on the market since Tapsell purchased it two years ago directly from Carey, who had visited Beechworth to research True History.

"At that time he was up to the fourth draft - a big, huge thing which he carried around the district and scribbled notes all over," Tapsell says. "When he returned to New York, he had it bound and we later acquired it from him."

However, "in many ways we don't want to sell it," admits Tapsell. "We love having it in the shop. And in years to come you can forget about (a price tag of) $50,000. Further down the track it's going to be worth a lot more."");document.write("

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Another recent example of the Australian literary archive market in action was the sale in Melbourne late last year of some of Carey's early typescripts and notebooks. They were sold mostly to the State Library and to private collectors, with prices ranging from $1800 for a notebook to $8894 for a carbon typescript manuscript of Carey's first (and still unpublished) novel, The Futility Machine.

Nicholas Pounder, who owns Nicholas Pounder Rare Books in Sydney and is one of Australia's leading experts in the archival field, says the literary archival market globally has become quite volatile, operated by entrepreneurial intermediaries.

He says complete archives of authors are rare, as manuscripts or working papers are often subdivided and sold individually. They are usually sold by private treaty or donated under the tax incentive for the arts scheme, instituted by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.

Still, Pounder says the sale of 20th-century literary manuscripts is confined to very few Australian authors. In the only public sale of any of Patrick White's archival material, the holograph manuscript of his 1986 novel, Memoirs of Many in One, was purchased in 1991 jointly by the National Library and State Library of NSW for $28,460.

Although he left a sizeable collection of letters (more than 1000 of them in the National Library), White was not inclined to let the public see the early drafts of his novels. He burnt them.

"Where there has been an open market in Australia, it's generally only for authors with an international reputation," says Pounder. "I could name only a few, such as Carey and White, who would have achieved comparable values with major US or British authors."